Mason Jars

I love Mason jars! 

I use them for canning, freezing, and short term food storage in both my fridge and pantry.

They hold spices on the walls of my kitchen. I am a very slow decorator, mostly because I cannot commit to anything and I'm not very good at seeing the whole decorating picture but I knew I wanted to do this as soon as we moved into the house.

My kitchen is very long with only one set of upper cabinets. I wanted something on that big wall that would stay clean but also be useful, in came the Mason jars.

You can use them as a flower vase 

Find this vase and many more here

I love the blue color here is the link

Turn them into soap dispensers!

You can buy these jars from this Etsy shop

Use them outside in the garden as hanging lights or lights for a party. 

You can find these lights here

Lifehackers has a great tutorial on how to make solar powered jar lights! I am going to make these in the spring and I will post our pictures then but here is a link to the project if you want to do an indoor project to get ready for spring! 

Follow this project here

I am lucky to still have old Mason jars from both my Grandmother and Great-Grandmother. They are the old blue jars that still have the Zinc lids, you can see one of them pictured above. I do not use the Zinc lids for canning but I do use them with my spice jars. If you like the look of the Zinc lids you can find bags of them at antique stores but they are becoming harder to find so grab them when you find them! 

How do you use Mason jars??

Exciting News

Well, it's 50 degrees outside. By the way, I live in OHIO! That is just crazy, I actually saw a tree budding today… boy, is he confused! 

I have some exciting news to share! My hubby and I are looking for homesteading property!  We looked at our first round of houses today. Most of them were no-goes for various reasons, too much money or damage that we do not want to deal with, etc. We are looking for our “forever” house so we are being fairly picky.

We did find one house that has a great 8 acre property with a small orchard and chicken coop! The house is very small… at this point I think we are just going to watch and wait. I have been doing research on what to look for in a homestead property and I am not coming up with a lot of people in the looking/buying stage. 

There are a lot of great established homesteading blogs out there but I thought I might talk about our search from the beginning. 

A lot of things go into finding the right property but we have really narrowed our scope to the big three as I will call them.

1.       Location of property – This is the biggest one for us. You cannot move the land once you buy it and we are trying to stay to a specific area to stay close to family. 

2.       The property itself – We can change something like plating the garden, adding trees, all of that, but we cannot bank on being able to buy more land around us so we need to be ok with the size; we are hoping between 5 and 12 acres. 

3.       The house – My husband is extremely handy and my father-in-law knows most things that my hubby does not. We can fix a lot about a house, but it needs good bones and we need to be able to live there right away. We also would like something a little bigger than we have now if possible.

I will keep everyone updated on the search and what we are finding!